Richard Defendorf of GreenBuildingAvdisor.com put together a little follow up on the 1st year performance of the Passive House in the Woods project in Hudson, WI. You can read the entire article after the jump: Passive House in the Woods Goes Energy-Positive.

We moved our studio this month. You can now find us in the historic Saint Anthony Main Building on the riverfront in Minneapolis. Feel free to stop in if you are in the neighborhood. For your records, here is our new street address:

TE Studio
212 2nd St. SE
Suite 222
Minneapolis, MN 55414

Phone and email remain the same. We look forward to serving you from our new space.

This just in: The Passive House in the Woods in Hudson Wisconsin officially clocked a net-energy positive meter reading in 2011.

What does that mean?

In short, it made more energy than it consumed. While we predicted this with our energy models, we found and learned through monitoring that some equipment and appliances use more energy than assumed. On the flip side, user behavior plays a major role as well and can effectively lower energy consumption over the predicted model.

Starting the journey towards energy neutrality and beyond with a Passive House works really well, as the building is designed to provide a comfortable environment with very little energy input. The addition of carefully sized renewable sources, such as photovoltaic and solar thermal can then balance the remaining energy flow, or reverse it.

We are looking for an Architect, designer and drafts person for a residential high-performance design firm. No minimum years of experience are required as long as our list of essential skills is met, and preferred skills are available to some extent. You will wear many hats, as this is a small but growing company. We have a huge passion for performance-based design and a holistic approach to sustainability. We are looking for partners in our mission to design better homes for the 21st century.

Essential Skills

You have:

proven yourself as an architectural designer and have a portfolio to illustrate your (built) body of work.

significant experience with the production of working drawings and specifications.

We have finally outgrown our old space and will be moving to our new office at St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis on February 1, 2012. We hope to welcome you soon in our new space and offer you leading-edge design and consulting services to bring your home project into the 21st century of performance.

Please make this change in your address book:

TE Studio, Ltd.
212 2nd St. SE, Suite 222
Minneapolis, MN 55414

Any other means of communication will remain the same. Happy New Year!

Thanks for those of you who came out yesterday to see the MinnePHit House in South Minneapolis. We literally had a full house and shared many great conversations after the initial presentation. Thanks for your interest. I suppose it did help that the StarTribune published an article about the project the same morning.

We thank those who came out to the Passive House in the Woods last night for the annual Passive House Days. It was a full house and we managed to raise the temperature inside by at least 5 degrees ;). Thanks for celebrating this first year of occupancy with us, the owner, Christine Frisk of InUnison Interior Design, and Josh Crenshaw of Morr Construction. We greatly enjoyed having you and look forward to Sunday’s public tour at 10.45 AM. There are still a few free tickets available. You can find them here: http://phitw8phdsun.eventbrite.com/

Today, we ran the first blower door test at the MinnePHit House in Minneapolis. The EnerPHit building standard prescribes maximum air-leakage for a retrofit Passive House of 1,0 ACH50 (air changes per hour at 50 Pascal pressure). Converted to CFM50 (cubic feet per minute at 50 Pascals), we were shooting for a magic number of 300 or less. Immediately, the house outperformed this with a reading of 285 CFM. We spent the rest of the morning with help from the Energy Conservatory, Ryan Stegora (builder) and Paul Brazelton (owner) identifying leaks. Some were patched right away—others marked for later improvements. At the end, we measured a steady 267 CFM50, which corresponds to 0.88 ACH50.

We are excited to see that even a 76 year old home can be made virtually airtight, and we are confident that the builder can improve on the performance of this rough-in result for the final test. The Passive House recommendation for retrofits is at 0.6 ACH50 (about 183 CFM50). This means that the home is currently one “Passive House in the Woods total air leakage” from achieving this reach goal.

To put things into perspective, this home started with a blower door result of 8.5 ACH50 and a corresponding 2,100 CFM50 of air leakage. Since then, it grew by almost 40%. Many existing homes we tested over the years in the TwinCities range from 7 to 15 ACH50. According to the Energy Conservatory, average new construction is in the range of 3 – 7 ACH50, with exceptional builders getting down to 1.5 ACH50 on occasion.

We are very pleased with the performance, which also reflects positively on our detailing and specifications.